We hope you all are enjoying your fall! It’s a busy time of year in our industry, and we’ve enjoyed getting to see many of you at conferences and events around the country. 

With the completion of our September monthly royalty distribution, The MLC’s 30th overall, we have now distributed more than $1.3 billion in blanket royalties. We are proud that each of those distributions has continued to be completed on time or early. Additionally, our membership has surpassed 30,000! We are grateful that our Members and partners continue to spread the word about The MLC so we can help more rightsholders collect the money they have earned.  

In this Quarter Note, we are excited to share more information about the publication of the Copyright Royalty Board’s final rate determination for the Phonorecords III (Phono 3) rate period. Rightsholders are now one step closer to receiving their final adjusted royalty payments for the uses of their songs that took place between 2018-2022.  

Thank you for taking the time to read our updates each quarter. We are grateful for your continued interest and support.  

On August 10, the Copyright Royalty Board published the final rate determination for the Phonorecords III (Phono 3) rate period (2018-2022). DSPs now have 6 months (until February 9, 2024) to deliver revised data and any additional royalties that they may owe for uses that took place during the Phono 3 rate period to The MLC. This should enable The MLC to begin distributing matched historical royalties from 2018-2020 and any adjustments to the blanket royalties from 2021-2022 that The MLC previously distributed starting in 2024.

The MLC has already distributed more than $24.5 million in historical royalties from early rate periods (pre-Phono 1, Phono 1 and Phono 2) — roughly 45% of the historical unmatched royalties that it received for these earlier periods. We continue to reprocess the remaining unmatched royalties using the steady stream of new data we receive each month from our Members. The following graphic shows the total amount of historical royalties that we have been able to distribute so far. 

Once The MLC receives the revised Phono 3 data and adjusted royalties from DSPs in 2024, we will be able to begin paying out matched historical royalties from the Phono 3 rate period, and that process will likely continue through the end of 2024. 

Our current focus is on distributing as much of the previously unmatched Phono 3 historical royalties we can. We have no current plans to perform a market share distribution, and we don't intend to begin considering when we might do one until after we've completed distributing all of the matched Phono 3 historical royalties we can. 

You can read more on our Historical Unmatched Royalties page here.

As we continue reprocessing unmatched data, we hope all our Members will play their part in The MLC process by making sure all of their song data is registered and accurate. As a reminder, we have matched nearly 70% of the historical unmatched royalties transferred to us by DSPs. That means that nearly $300 million in historical royalties will be eligible to be distributed to Members provided they have claimed their shares of the works that we’ve matched to those historical royalties.  

Have you recently checked to make sure you’ve claimed all of your shares (or your client’s)? We’ve created several tools to help our Members check that all their data is correct and updated in The MLC’s Portal. Before we start distributing Phono 3 royalties in 2024, we hope that each of our Members will take the time to use the following three tools:

1. Members can use our Claiming Tool to search for — and claim — any missing shares of their songs that other Members have registered with The MLC. 
2. Members can use our Registration Tools to register any songs that have not yet been registered with us.   
3. Members can use our Matching Tool to search for uses of their works in the remaining unmatched data we have for those historical royalties. 

Need help using any of these tools? Check out our new series of MLC Tools tutorials on The MLC’s YouTube Channel with helpful step-by-step videos like this one: 

Over the last few months, our team attended events in Nashville, Cleveland, Miami, Memphis, and New York City; meeting and educating hundreds of rightsholders about The MLC. Check out our list of conferences and events where you can find us over the next month — we hope to see you soon! 

October 2-6: Billboard Latin Week

October 8-11: IMPF Summit

October 10-13: MONDO

October 12-13: Digilogue Days 

October 14: International Conference by The Copyright Society and ALAI

October 24-26: Music Tectonics Conference 

October 24-27: NOLA MusiCon

October 26-28: CMS National Conference 

Billboard: Songwriters’ Streaming Royalty Rates for 2018-2022 (Phonorecords III) Are In the Books 

Billboard: Songwriters & Publishers Have a $250M Payday Coming After Streaming Royalty Determination 

Hypebot: Top 6 Ways to make money as a Musician 

SONA: Songwriters: You may be owed money! Here’s how to get it 

Spotify: Performing Rights Organizations and Collecting Societies 

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